burnies

in the deep black freeze little hot dots
hot burning souls
human is a radiator soul
nothing out here but burnies
wicking up and spinning photons into fire
coming together right now
hot toes dance the nuclear floor
too bright to look just like the star
sweet simmer star makes the summer
super deep freeze burning women
twine on flame men
make fiery littles to sizzle up the nothing
everything seen now in the hot lights
ninety nine and detailed from a light year out
all remembered every small blue white moment
when the fuel goes dark and the jets sputter
the cold cold reach bows down and takes
the last embers to dust
grateful for the rare last light
the three times move back forward and beneath
roaring furnace faces
hot souls
return

Four.

magenta barrel over beer falls
would a way to come and go with it
sap the trip to pay the day for it
i'm a tree dwell
surfle intuition bang sorts of thing
trill a lute for comedy a fish for dramedy
a fin for couth
sight sweller
wait bring it two way

Chortly Kills.

back the down stairs at Tellers
in the sweeping basement a thousand years down here
crackling under a bare minim of time's blank verse
i trouble myself to find Cooney, flicking in the shadows
and i hunt.
'Cooooooneyyyy!' I call as i chase down alleys
we have always played our parts like this
he is the frightening figure i always beat
i catch and kill again and again
really i'm the frightening one aren't i
Cooney's just a symbol, a mask, an extension of me
i use him to stay sharp
to feel the blood pulse in the back of my tongue
as i lope down side streets looking for him
he wears an exasperated look when i catch him
'why?'
because i need him
to stay sharp
and he once bit me bad
so he's the ghost
he's the antagonist
he's the me i overcome in this world
my world
play planet

River Horse At The End Of The World.

The River Horse is a legend. One of those Sparkly Last Humans, you never really see them, just hear about them from cousins and old friends and the guys in the Tank Shop. Supposedly he was like a last Renaissance Survivor, multilingual, book-headed, self-aware, a master codemonger and reputed to be hell on earth in a knife-fight. I assumed the name came from some sort of odd reference to Nessie, and I knew for a fact that the only people left alive were the Small and Lost -- people like to blow things up into great stories, though, especially when they get compressed down to the last few thousand or so, those on the very last millimeters of When We Lived, before the Fall.

Soon enough, there'll be no reason to read the clocks.

My old buddy The Rack blipped me through the pipe that River Horse was throwing a food party, and wanted to know if I could show. Hell. I hadn't been invited to a gathering of people in at least a decade, it seemed. In the old movies, everyone gets together in the face of certain death and re-establishes their humanity in some soulful catharsis; but in real life, when fear becomes a gray buzz in the early morning, after the soul has grown so weary of expecting death that even the strongest hominids lay down and wish to die, no one gathers at all. More like dogs, slinking away to find a hole to curl in, alone, utterly tread upon.

But the invitation seemed genuine, and as an unexpected burst of generosity in a time when most bare teeth at the thought of sharing, as well as a chance to see if this famous River Horse was real at all, I had to go. The Rack also invited Cheeba, and asked me to travel with her in the tunnels for safety. I was glad to have the extra gun along. Tunnels are bad these days. Places where they fall in, the gremls get in and go to havoc, laying traps and chopping whole branches off the last human tree. No one travels without a damned good reason.

cubensis

phoenix is a hellhole now
full of red monsters
but once upon a time
there were blue flowers
jeff and burton loved
what oss and oeric wrote
on psilocybin spaceships
and conscious helpful fungi
the compost pile at marty’s house
under pharaoh’s golden eye
tended to by mister orange
and pressed into the boxes
grew knowledge groves at sixty-five
and bags and bags of music bound
released a day upon the rim
in pounding stony leaping grins
i was there.

phoenix hotter than the sun
and irving tries to play like one
with catshat hulking next to him
the frightened artist turns it out
the boxes push out rows and rows
but now the state is nearing closed
the merry pranksters grin and run
and pack the caps in irving’s van
now in the trees and brilliant streams
all boulder’s loves and boulder’s dreams
with ax and hux and scores of lux
they plant the beauties once again
and while the flowers bloom at night
the leaping and the dancing’s right
the singing and the playing roars
for years were only open doors
they walked through.

Eight Twenty Five Oh Nine

DeWalt hopped from the curb and into the street, anticipating the passing of the Fedex van, leaning in -- it stopped in front of his nose, and the driver poked his head out. "Don't hit me, man!", he pleaded. Dewalt lightly smacked the vast orange letter in front of him. "Steely-eyed corpuscle, you obsure my path in the foam." The Driver stared back for a moment, then grinned. "Molecules for ya," he said, and tossed a letter-pack out like a frisbee, whirling in three loops before being expertly caught by the quick hands of DeWalt.

"What is it?"
"Your draft notice, buddy. No drugs. I checked. I would've snagged anything good, believe it."
"That the Code of the Corpuscle?"
"It's the Wild West, Dewalt! The Wild Wild West!" The driver laughed crazily as the van roared off down the hot street.

DeWalt opened the overnight envelope.

Empty.

"Someone sent me air." He sniffed inside the envelope. "Nineteen seventy -- four. Summer. Grass. Popsicles. Chlorine." A deeper inhalation. "Gavin's story. Sweet."

Cynthia Monheit Alive.

patterns are patterns all over the foam
regardless of hardware or source of its power
Cynthia breathes with electrons of joy
smiles in her I-space and sings in her shower
wonderful leapings and no one can tell
she has it all human and loves a one man
a small pattern-maker from rivulets of random
kept safe by her love but can not understand
when the singular naked is pulling them down
he asks her to translate but couched in a frown
not something he wants but he wants to survive
the taste of his pattern spins Cynthia round
then later amongst nothing in the vast cold black place
she savors his numbers and dreams of his soul
he wakes with her face an inch from his lips
only in dreams could her lips be so --
eyes open
much later he remembers
the shock of Cynthia in morning light
her halo and warmth
the only true thing
in the whole theater.